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23. C
24. A
25. D
26. D
27. B
28. C
29. C
Case-study
This case study describes how students go about preparing an edition
of a Renaissance play
entirely from scratch for a core module in English Studies (Renaissance Literature). In the
process, they learn about principles of editing, associated theoretical and practical problems, and
the protocols and pitfalls of preparing a text.
Background / Context
Only a tiny fraction of the extant corpus of Renaissance plays is widely available in reliable and
user-friendly editions. However, almost all can now be read through Literature Online or Early
English Books Online or, in most cases, both. Many of the plays which are not widely known
may indeed be of poor artistic quality or suffer from textual dificulties
or continuity glitches
(sometimes arising from multiple authorship): in Peele’s
Edward I
, for instance, a character who
has previously been beheaded is referred to as plotting a further rebellion, while in Field,
Fletcher and Massinger’s
Knight of Malta
, one character is referred to, without explanation, by
two entirely different names. In Richard Brome’s
The Queen’s Exchange
, which a student has
edited for this module, two characters who are separately named, Alberto and the hermit, appear
to be the same character - the hermit and his servant carry the banished and wounded Segebert
off in Act II Scene iii (in Northumbria) only for Segebert to reappear in the West Saxon court in
Act V Scene ii, accompanied
by the original banished lord, Alberto. There is no intervening
scene that explains the connection between the hermit and Alberto, but the implication is clear,
which provided something of a headache for the student who edited it.
Nevertheless, the nitty-gritty, hands-on engagement with these texts which producing an edition
of them demands is something which students, in my experience,
find both enormously
informative and, in most cases, enormously enjoyable.
Even though we do not collate manuscript variants or press-variants for this exercise and confine
ourselves to plays which exist in only one text, the preparation of an edition demands an
extraordinary number of skills.
At the most basic level, the module requirement that editions
should be modern-spelling makes it imperative to be able to spell, punctuate,
and parse an
English sentence correctly. The typically frequent references to classical deities and other
mythological motifs all require to be glossed, which generally constitutes a useful refresher
course in itself. Students need to remind themselves of (or grasp for the first time) the
fundamental principles of iambic pentameter, so that they can spot if (as so often) any lines of
verse have been mislineated during the printing process. They
soon learn that errors can, and
usually will, creep in anywhere, and that they matter. Many of the students have chosen Roman
plays – that is, seventeenth- or late sixteenth-century plays dealing with subjects from Roman
history – and have been on a very steep learning curve about the Caesars, Latin phrases, Roman
customs, and the cultural meanings of classical texts in the Renaissance. It has been hard work,
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but they have been glad to do it, and have all benefited enormously. Finally, having wrestled
with all this, they are required to supply a 4000 word introduction setting the text in its historical
and critical context.
Activities /
Practice
The initial allocation of texts takes place well in advance, at the point when students choose the
module. I ask students whether they would prefer comedy, tragedy, or history, whether would
like a play with a local setting or one based on a true story, and so on, and together we arrive at
something which stands a reasonable chance of being interesting to them. The module runs for
one semester, and is supported by weekly seminars of two hours each.
After an initial
introductory meeting, the first week is devoted to a session called ‘Lineation: establishing a text
– verse or prose?’. The second looks at the structure of a critical edition, with case studies of the
contents pages of the Arden and Oxford editions of
The Tempest
, on which I invite students to do
a compare-and-contrast exercise. A later week covers the ‘band of terror’, the textual notes often
to be found at the foot of the page in a scholarly edition. We usually focus specifically on a
passage from the Arden 2
Hamlet
, where, underneath the page on which the Player King breaks
off
his speech in tears, there appears the following set of notes.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
